Tags: book

These certainly aren’t your kid’s LEGOs. Famed brick building artist and author Mike Doyle is back with another book of LEGO-based art – this time with a decidedly spooky theme. With chapters titled Creepy Crawlers, Dark Towers, Indulgences, Evil Attunement, Pits of Fire, and even Riot Girls, the new book, called Beautiful LEGO 2: Dark, is decidedly lacking in fairy tale castles or race cars.…

Book binding has seen many variations, from the iconic Penguin paperbacks to highly unusual examples like this from late 16th century Germany. It’s a variation on the dos-à-dos binding format (from the French meaning “back-to-back”). Here however, the book opens six different directions, each way revealing a different book. It seems that everyone has a tablet or a Kindle tucked away in their bag (even my 90 year old grandma), and so it sometimes comes as a surprise to remember the craftsmanship that once went along with reading.…

Coolness Graphed has been charting life and its relative coolness or ‘uncoolness’ for the past two years. RC Jones began the project as a creative outlet to counterbalance a boring day job, and within three months of publishing on tumblr, the project was receiving attention from national media including Forbes and MSN.

Earlier this year, a collection of graphs was published in a book that seems perfect for geeky gifting. In the announcement of his book deal, Jones shares, “Less than a year ago I got an email that I could tell was very important because it contained the phrase “you had us at ‘sporklift.’”…

Danish artist Olafur Eliasson reminds us to never judge a book by its cover. Better known for his public installations and sculptural work, Eliasson’s book Your House brings architectural scale to a microscopic level. Out of 454 pristine pages, Eliasson laser-cuts the negative space of his Copenhagen home, each sheet serving as a paper-thin cross section that gives shape to tiny doors, stairways, and window frames.…

“From within a book row on row a forest of knowledge continues to grow. While brackets and comma’s flourish and bloom, we fear the end begins to loom.” These are the words that can be found on the amazing book sculptures created by Emma Taylor. She carefully picks each book she turns into a work of art. With her careful hand, she brings out the story literally in the form of cut out pages of the book. …

As libraries around the world are moving towards the future and digitizing their collections, this has been no easy task. The fastest scanning method up until now involved cutting books up to feed them through a quick scanner, which seems blasphemous to do to rare editions, but the alternative of manually scanning each page would be far too tedious. But low and behold BFS-Auto, a robotic book scanner that can digitize books at the rate of over 250 pages/minute without damaging the book in any way! …

Animal portraiture fights for the top of the charts of cheesiness in most cases. While most people would agree that a dog in a Halloween costume is particularly amusing, many dogs probably get humiliated being forced into outfits that make them uncomfortable. Then, the next thing you know a photographer puts together a pointless book with a collection of humiliated dogs.

What if instead the photographer took some time to capture the noble dogs that save lives? Dutch photographer Charlotte Dumas did just that. …

“It all began with the ominous death of a fox:” so begins the beautifully illustrated book Pincel de Zorro. An whimsical tale from Spanish author Sergio A. Sierra, the Japan based tale is complimented by wonderfully complex illustrations by Meritxell Ribas using a unique technique called grattage: paint is scraped off the page with a pointed tool, leaving only the canvas beneath.…

“I am after the maximum communication with minimum elements”, says designer Noma Bar of the aim behind his clever prints. Though his art is minimal in detail, his talented use of negative space speaks volumes, ending in humorous and even poignant results. Bar is so adept at the technique he has recently authored a book titled “Negative Space.” Find the book, along with much more of his work at dutchuncle.co.uk.…

Back in 1981, urban design visionary Donald Appleyard published his now classic book Livable Streets. In this video by Streetfilms, we revisit some of Appleyard’s original research, which for the first time explored the way that car traffic affected our neighborhood social interactions and the attitude we held towards our homes.
To get your copy of the once hard to find book, Routledge Press will be publishing a much anticipated second edition of Livable Streets in 2011.…